


your biggest mistake

by elliptical



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Afterlife, Aftermath of Torture, Body Horror, Dream Bubbles, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Past Abuse, Slavery, Stockholm Syndrome, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 21:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8594104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: The Helmsman needs help to move on.





	

**Author's Note:**

> _learned helplessness (noun)_ : a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed
> 
> _it's a shame you don't know what you're running from_   
>  _would your bones have to break and your lights turn off_   
>  _would it take the end of time to hear your heart's false start_   
>  _oh, you know this is your biggest mistake_   
>  _what a waste, what a waste, what a waste_   
>  _-your biggest mistake, ellie goulding_

The helmsblock has an intruder.

You register it with your own pan rather than the systems, because no amount of willpower will bring those back to normal functioning. Intruders are rare these nights, since you have very little patience for them, and it’s hard to keep track of time in the first place. But the door opens with a soft swoosh that your wetware aurals acknowledge, and you raise your head to scan the newcomer with your wetware optics, which are borderline useless compared to the cameras you still can’t access, but at least still slightly useful for information processing.

She’s a psionic. Rust. Wearing soft shoes that rustle against the floor instead of clack. Clothed in some kind of baggy hoodie and sweatpants getup that’s far from flattering. Leaking static everywhere, enough for an alarm flare to ping on your neurals and wash the room in red and blue emergency light.

“Turn off,” she says. The lights strobe, but they’re not accompanied by sound, because your Empress finds loud shrieking alarms obnoxious and yet doesn’t mind spotlights ripped straight from a rave, because your Empress is an enigma.

You bare your teeth at the newcomer.

She has no visible weapons. She raises one hand, elegantly, and the alarm switches off.

You try not to look worried by that.

“An easy trick,” she says, unperturbed. Her voice is raspy, but there’s very little emotion in it. You cast through your facial recognition database to pull expression analysis, but those systems aren’t quite calibrated correctly either. “Alarm is triggered by switch, yes? Switch flips when leaking psionics are detected. Psionic flips back. You build your prison with too many buttons. Easy to break.”

Bored now that the trick has been explained, you let your head fall again; holding it up makes the aching between your shoulders worse. It won’t take her long to get bored herself and wander off. There’s not much to see in here besides you, and you’re not much to see either, these nights.

She stands where she is for a few moments; she’s out of your view, but your aurals don’t take in any new footsteps or static surges to accompany floating. Then she sighs, an irritable huff rather than pity. “Your family sends me,” she says.

Your jaw clenches.

“I call them idiots,” she says, her tone conversational, like she’s discussing the weather. “I can do nothing for idiot psion. But they say to try. I say, his eyes are white. He knows he is dead. What do you want from me? The jadeblood bargains tea in exchange. I like her tea. She grows her leaves herself. So here I am.”

One traitorous ear twitches, but you hope she doesn’t notice. People can only talk so much before they stop looking for a response, and then they either leave or resort to other means. You’ve learned to be patient over the sweeps, and you’re sure you can be more patient than she is. Apparently she doesn’t even want to be here.

She watches you through her own white eyes, which you can feel even though you’re still determinedly not looking at her. Seconds pass, then minutes, time dragging by as you stay locked in this tableau. Then she drags her slippered feet forward, making an unpleasant sound against the tiles. A muscle in your cheek twitches.

“I get no tea with no progress,” she says. “A shame.”

You could not give less of a fuck about her beverage preference, and you’d like to tell her that, and also tell her where she can shove her horns. But you’ve been goaded with worse than this, and retaliation never works. You stay limp, forcing your jaw to relax, your shoulders to sag in the wires.

“I tell them you are hopeless,” she says, clicking her tongue. “Idiots. Optimists. The mutant says not to give up on family. I say, he is beyond help. The mutant says no one is beyond help. I will disappoint him.”

Your nostrils flare. Bereft of the majority of your systems, you can’t retreat into the bulk of the ship like you usually do to squash down emotional surges. You register the quickened pace of your own breathing, and resolve to bite her if she comes close enough.

“The mutant says you come home when you’re ready. He says you have a place, always. He says to pass on the message, so I pass on the message.” She eyes you for another moment, and then shrugs. “Hopeless. I leave you be.”

\---

You’re alone for a while after that, which is how you prefer things. The facsimile of the ship is imperfect, mostly because your own influence doesn’t stretch as far as you’d like. The bubbles and memories merge together, and the other trolls inhabiting this shared dreamscape make their own habitats. You can’t create the entirety of space to fly through - you can’t even create the entirety of the ship, try as you might. The best you’ve managed is the helmsblock and the engine room and the adjoining two flight decks, the doors at the end of their hallways opening into the lush garden around the others’ fake hive. So you focus on internal processes instead, on reconstructing and coding your systems, an acceptable task due to its impossibility. You’ll never replicate the hundreds of thousands of tiny ship senses through imagination or genius alone, but trying is a good way to pass the time.

The next intrusion is the psionic again. She flips off the alarm faster than she did the first time, crossing to the base of the column and staring up at you, more businesslike than before. “You make mistakes,” she says.

You watch her and will your muscles limp.

“A fool.” She spits at the biowires, and then she laughs, and the sound sends fear senses skittering down your spine. “To choose this pain. A helpless fool.”

You suddenly know why she’s familiar.

Most of the time, you don’t fuck with your memories from before the ship. You keep them locked up tight in a place they can’t touch you, because they’re not worth your time or attention. But she’s been a presence there for longer than you can consciously register, a shade flitting in and out rather than a solid mass like the other trolls in the dreamscape. 

She was there when the slavers stole you as a child, an enticing shape that drew you far from the safety of your hive and your lusus, until you stumbled into their caravan. She was there when the Imperial testers took your power levels and the machines spat back middling range, disguised as just another rustblood as she fucked with your results.

She was there when you were chained in the factory, when you lay in a cell that was little more than a crate, too weak with pain and illness to rise for your evening shift. There was no disguise then. You saw her as she was, Death come to take you, and the relief was overpowering. Slaves have nothing to fear from death. You closed your eyes and breathed out and prayed she’d steal you away before an overseer came in and put you down painfully. She leaned over you and kissed you on the mouth and breathed life back into you, just enough for you to pull yourself up and stagger to the assembly lines. That was the night _he_ broke in. He stood tall and healthy and proud, like a divine bringer of peace, like a god of warmth and rest. You were still ravaged by the fever. You assumed he was a byproduct of delirium as Death had been, and you asked him if he meant to take you from this, and you collapsed in his arms, and he did.

She was there when the war tore the planet apart, razed towns and outer colonies to rubble. She was there to pick off your first defenders and leave you vulnerable, there to undermine your security networks, there to betray your location to the highbloods.

She was there when he burned.

You recoil.

“I know that look,” she says, still unperturbed. “You see me now.”

“ _Get out._ ”

Your voice is raspier than hers, pitifully weak from disuse. It’s all but a whisper, your tongue swiping over your lips to try to wet them, your vocal cords rattling as you draw in air. But she hears. She raises her face and locks eyes with you and smiles, cruel, distant.

“You speak. I thought you forgot how.”

“Get _out!"_

A hoarse, primal scream. You can’t make it carry the same volume as an average troll’s, but it’s the tone that’s sent the others scurrying from the block when nothing else will. The fragility of it is unnerving, you theorize. When you scream, you don’t sound like a troll throwing a temper tantrum. You don’t even sound like a wounded animal. You sound like a different creature entirely, something from before the dawn of the universe, something long forgotten except in the creeping day terrors that drive trolls to sopor.

She’s utterly unmoved. Literally unmoved. You scream at her again, your voice cracking, and she faces it with the nonchalance someone might face a brisk wind. Then she sits down on the slimy tiles around the column base, heedless of the moisture soaking into her sweatpants.

“I bring your mutant now?” she asks.

“Get the fuck out!”

“Yes?”

“ _No!_ Get _out!"_

You swear there’s amusement in her eyes. “You seek to intimidate me with… loud noise? I feel true fright. I dive for the hills.”

You stop shouting, fighting to breathe normally, the pain a tight band around your chest. She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t so much as shift her weight. You don’t know how to cast other ghosts out of your own bubble through sheer willpower, and you can’t exactly hit her with your psionics. The rigging makes physical combat an inconvenient venture at best. Apparently she’s not going to go when she’s asked, so you have to wait her out, which will be difficult now that you’ve proved there’s still someone listening inside your shell.

“You make mistakes,” she repeats, slow, like you didn’t hear the first time. “You stay with the pain. Why? You have no crew. No Empress. This ship is not real. You can do nothing here except hurt. Pointless.”

“Leave me alone.”

“No.” She presses her lips together. “Why choose to be helpless? Make a torture prison and get mad when people use it. I can hurt your body. You can’t stop me.”

You shrink back slightly in spite of yourself. “Are you going to?”

“To prove a point, maybe. Your family will be angry, though. No more tea for me.” The corner of her mouth twitches upward. “Why stay here?”

“This is where I’ve always been.”

“Untrue.”

“This is where I want to be.”

“Why?”

You turn your face away from her.

“You cannot shut your eyes.” She’s still sitting on the floor, hasn’t attempted to move. “The goggles hurt, yes? Hold them open. But you are not blind because you do not imagine blindness. Why imagine pain? Why not make goggles that don’t pinch the eyelids?”

You stare resolutely at the wall.

“Your body hurts,” she adds. “It cries to stop breathing. I hear in your chest. You cannot pull in enough air. You cannot imagine good life support. You wither. The wires eat you alive. The nerves you have left scream for mercy. The muscles beg for rest. No practical setup with engines switched off. You collapse under weight when the shocks don’t work. You fall to pieces. You imagine bones and joints together, so they stay together, but is a hard thing. Your body begs for death. You know you can’t die again. Why put the body through this?”

There are a thousand answers, all of them legitimate, though you’re not sure she’ll see it that way. You bite your tongue and hiss, “Pain is important.”

She scoffs. “Nothing is important.”

“Pain is.”

“But only some pain, yes? You wish me to leave to stop the pain of seeing. Pain of remembering. You wish the body pain to hide from the mind.”

“I am the First Imperial Helmsman,” you tell her as calmly as you can. “I’ve been over this with the other trolls, the ones who call me family. I will not play their asinine games. I will not pretend to be something I’m not. I choose my afterlife like you choose yours. Leave me be.”

“You are a fool.” She spits it, rising fluidly to her feet. “My choice alone, I would hurt you. I would make you frightened. I would make you want to fight back. Give you reason to break these chains. But what happens then, hmm? I drag you to the hive and you shut down again? Useless. You hang in your grave.”

She walks out of the block, leaving you with only the slow rattle of your breath for company.

\---

By the time she returns again, you’ve calibrated some of your ship senses better. It’s a matter of learning how to project your consciousness outward, into the rest of the bubble, which is as absurd as trying to dreamwalk. You broke the hurdle by imagining yourself sliding down the wires in your brain, through the tangled network of synapses that make up the ship. You got the imaginary cameras on the imaginary flight decks working, though it took some concentration and dream manipulation to make them play in real time rather than spit feedback loops. There’s not much to see, and you haven’t expanded your little slice of ship physically farther, but you watch the woman move toward the helmsblock, and you see her from six different angles when she steps inside.

“I not come for you,” she says without preamble. “This time. The mutant wants to come. So does the jade. And the olive. I tell them all no, I will do it. Not for you. I… like them. They deserve better than what you put them through. So I keep them away. I cannot do forever, but for now. I keep them away.”

You don’t have to raise your head to watch her, not now that the cameras are working. Information scrawls across your neurals, and though it’s nothing more than observations you manually input, the sense of machinery behind your thoughts is comforting.

“I speak East Alternian,” you finally tell her, using her native tongue.

She blinks, stiffens, startled. At least there’s some satisfaction in that. You’ve managed to surprise her. When she speaks, her voice is as rough as ever, but there’s new fluidity to it, the ease of talking without needing to work through mental translations. “You might have mentioned that, shitface.”

“Bitch, please.” A rare grin tugs on your mouth, the muscles so unused the motion aches. “I’m the First Imperial Helmsman. I’m a bajillion sweeps old - that’s an exact figure, by the way. I know all the languages. All of them.”

“Wow.” She narrows her eyes. “If I didn’t know you, I’d say you were happy to see me.”

“I’m never happy.”

“Why tell me you speak East Alternian now? Actually want to have a conversation?”

“A language barrier makes it harder for you to talk to me. Makes you more likely to leave me alone. But if you’re going to make a habit of coming in here, we may as well talk candidly.”

She folds her arms over her chest, looking for all the world like she’s reevaluating you, like you’re a code that won’t compile right and she’s searching for the error. “You’re not stupid, Helmsman.”

“No, I’m not.”

“And you know you’re dead.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then what,” she says, opening her arms and gesturing expansively at the space around you, “the _fuck."_

“I don’t know the trolls who live in that hive.”

“If you truly didn’t remember them, you wouldn’t have such a problem with me.” She curls her fingers inward, forming fists, and lets her hands drop. “If you were truly an unfaltering Imperial loyalist, you’d thank me. Worship me, even. I preserved you for your Empress. I brought down the rebels. If you didn’t remember your first life, you wouldn’t recognize me. If you did remember it but had seamlessly overwritten it with Imperial loyalty, you’d have no problem with me. But you associate me with pain. Which means the Psiioniic still exists.”

“The Psiioniic shouldn’t exist.”

“What does your pain prove, Helmsman? You’re not accomplishing anything. You’re hanging in the dead skeleton of a ghost ship. You have no Empress to serve, no crew to impress. Your ship body will always be incomplete. There are three trolls waiting footsteps away to welcome you home, and you choose to entomb yourself instead?”

“I don’t need to _justify_ myself to you. You don’t know anything about me. I don’t appreciate you pretending you do. Oh, if we just remind the Helmsman of the right memories, he’ll come down. If we just use enough logical arguments and the right combination of positivity and negativity, he’ll come. We just need to be persistent. You think I don’t fucking know what you’re doing? They’ve already tried it on me. They’ve thrown out everything they can think of.”

“They think it makes sense to force you into being the Psiioniic again. I want to know why it’s so important to be Helmsman.”

“So you can argue with me about it? I know your agenda already. Screw off. I’m not going to - going to spoonfeed you all the vulnerability you need to get under my skin.”

“Apparently I’ve already gotten under your skin. Plus, the bioware does a good job of that regardless. Your pain is unsustainable.” She sits down, settling in the same place she did the last time she came in here, resting her hands on her knees. “No one is fucked up enough to want to stay here pointlessly for eternity. You’re trying to accomplish something, or avoid something, or both. The question is, what?”

“Are you trying to start a feelings jam?”

“Would it work?”

“The Sufferer already tried.”

“The Sufferer tried to reach you as the Signless reaching the Psiioniic. You’re a different creature entirely, the Psiioniic’s continued existence notwithstanding. But you won’t speak. That’s fine. I didn’t expect you to speak to me.”

It's weird, the way she talks now that she's not trying to make you listen, the sentences more like idle trains of thought than pointed barbs. You watch her, reevaluating her the same way she did you, putting together the pieces you've learned of her existence.

“You came down here even though you didn't expect me to speak. Because… you like them.”

“They’re foolish, and too optimistic, and too soft. But - there’s a certain appeal in people so determined to make an afterlife out of softness. The Sufferer would do well to stop denying his own anger, and the Disciple ought to face her loneliness, and the Dolorosa keeps burying her grief. They’ll need to examine those things eventually. They know that. But they still try. It’s equal parts obnoxious and admirable.”

“And you? What are you avoiding?”

She snorts. “Nothing. I have no reason to hide from who I am.”

“Nor do I. So we understand each other.”

“You and I, we’re very much the same, that’s true. Perhaps that’s why I have so much trouble understanding the choices you’re making.” She shakes her head, and a loose curl of hair drapes across her eyes, and you find yourself fascinated by the movement of her hand as she tucks it behind her ear. “I am going to talk. You’ve conveniently built yourself a prison where you need to listen, and talking at you is probably better than torturing you, yes?”

“Some might argue being talked at is a form of torture.”

“Then I get what I want on more than one level. A winning scenario for me.”

You laugh, startling yourself with it, almost immediately dissolving into a flurry of coughs. If she’s worried about the chest spasms, she doesn’t show it, and if she's surprised by the laugh, she doesn't show that either. She just waits for you to quiet before she speaks.

“I did not volunteer to become Death. The choice was made for me in predestination. I did not want to be the one to cause the suffering of our people, or the one to destroy the lives of people I may have cared for in another life. But we don’t get to decide our own lives. We’re hatched into the universes we’re hatched into. The freedom we have from there depends case to case, but for trolls like you and I, well. We exist at the whims of other people.”

You’re trying hard not to be interested, but there’s no more interesting places to cast your consciousness while she talks, and you pick up her words either way. Rather than trying to bury yourself in the systems, you lift your head and cement yourself in the helmsblock, focusing on her speech to ease your aches the same way you usually focus on your neurals.

“Time is less than linear. Timelines are threads you can untangle, smooth, but they all exist simultaneously. Their progressions are all cemented in ways no one can change. The timeline that killed your revolution existed before I had memories of doing my work in it, because I had already been there. All that was left to do was complete the loops that already existed. Knowing you need to do something to ensure stability doesn’t make it any less painful, though. I knew I was working for the destruction of our species, for a master who wanted to consume the universe. I knew I would never be allowed to show anyone kindness, or have any meaningful relationships, or experience anything except misery.

“I fought my master at every turn. I sought loopholes that would allow me to change things. I attempted tiny acts of rebellion. I looked for ways to manipulate temporal mechanics to create better outcomes. All fruitless, of course. Things were always meant to happen the way they did, and any fighting on my part was childish folly. But my resistance was all that was left to me. I sought the comfort of other trolls. I sought small relationships. I sought to throw inconsequential displays of love and trust at people to balance out the evil I was doing. But since I was always destined to wring more evil than good, none of that mattered.

“The most I could offer anyone in the end was not becoming a sadist. The people I tried to help met worse fates for it, so I stopped helping them. I closed myself off to the suffering I inflicted so I wouldn’t go mad. I stopped fighting my master because the taste of tiny victories wasn’t worth the pain they caused. I completed my orders quickly and efficiently. I did not draw out people’s pain where it needn’t have been. When sick trolls needed to die, I killed them fast. When injured trolls needed to die, I killed them fast. There are reasons the military feared me but your fellow slaves sought my embrace. I had my priorities.”

She stops speaking, appearing satisfied with her tale for the moment. Her voice is steel - whatever vulnerability she may have experienced once is either smoothed over or long buried. You wait until you’re sure she isn’t going to start again, and then you say, “You let the Sufferer burn.”

You mean to match her tone, the closed off coldness, but a tendril of remembered grief leaks in regardless. Your mouth twists.

“The Sufferer needed to burn.” She shifts, refolding her legs under herself. “I could not have saved him or his revolution, nor any of the revolutions and uprisings that followed it. But the Disciple’s writings survived. Trolls remembered, because that was what the timeline required. You see, I was never more than a pawn pretending to be a queen. The pawn can pretend as long as it wants, but that doesn’t stop it from being a pawn.”

“And now you’re squatting with them while they play out their - their stupid fucking hopefulness charade. And you call me the fool? You know nothing good ever comes of hope, of staying close to people, and you’re letting yourself _like_ them.”

“I imagine my story sounds familiar enough to you, Helmsman, yes? Here is where I see the difference between us. Death was my release from my chains. Death was the only hopeful promise I ever had fulfilled. I wished to stop existing, but I didn’t. Here I am, still conscious, still pretending to breathe. So what does one do when they realize they’re a shade? They make a life they want. They choose to indulge in ways they couldn’t in life. They choose to take advantage of the ability to feel something other than pain.”

She pulls herself to her feet with eerie gracefulness, otherworldly movement that reminds you just how ancient she is. Then she raises herself into the air and floats forward, until your faces are only a foot apart, her eyes locked on yours.

“You, Helmsman,” she says. “You decide your chains are all that matters of you.”

“This is the best I’ve ever been.”

“An eaten-away husk of flesh and dead wires? A pale facsimile of the ship you once were? You truly believe this pain is better than being a troll again?”

“Yes.”

She hovers where she is, unblinking, the tension between you stretched so tight that you think something has to snap. “It would be so easy to be cruel to you. You have no defenses. I would have thought you’d build something more practical in your afterlife, even if you do prefer being a ship. Surely you can be a machine without suffering the way you are.”

“The pain is important.”

“You’re afraid not to feel pain.”

“The pain is a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“What I am.”

Her brows draw together, and an odd expression crosses her face. If you didn’t know better, you’d say it was pity. Then she moves forward in millimeters, inching. Her hand comes up slow, so slow, noticeable enough that you could shrink away from it when you realize the ending trajectory of her palm.

You don’t. Her fingertips brush your cheekbone, a featherlight touch, and something in your chest releases. You slump forward, almost knocking your forehead into her nose as you crane your head into her hand, trying to get her to press harder.

She lays her palm flat against your skin, cupping your jaw. “Tell me to stop if you don’t want this,” she says, and you know you shouldn’t want this, shouldn’t accept this, shouldn’t allow yourself the selfishness of this comfort, but you trill like a grub seeking their lusus and keep nuzzling her regardless.

“Oh,” she says, almost breathless. “Oh.”

She’s so slow, so careful as she brushes a few loose curls of hair back underneath your headband, as she presses both palms against your cheeks and massages tension in your temples. It’s almost excruciating. You know you’re not allowed this, but you can’t find the words to make it end, because you don’t _want_ to. Amid the soft glow of her warmth is a thorny tendril of worry, digging deep into your chest, and it makes you whine with remembered despair.

She pulls away then, the corners of her mouth pulling down. “It’s bad?”

“No,” you tell her, past being able to pretend detachment, lost and helpless. “It’s _good._ I don’t want it to _end."_

“I’m not _going_ anywhere, you stupid grub,” she says, and buries her hands into your hair, massaging your neglected hornbeds.

You cry out. You haven’t been touched at all since you died - your hissing and spitting was enough to keep the others away despite their desire to ease your pain, devoted as they still are to morality and consent. And before your death, you were usually sedated when the mechanics needed to work on you, and even when you weren’t, they were poking at the parts of your body numb from sweeps of deadened nerves. Your Empress rewarded you sometimes with the comfort of physical affection after you’d completed a particularly taxing journey or exposed a rogue traitor, but she never gave enough to sate you. It’s important to long for more. It’s important to feel pain. It’s important not to become spoiled.

The Demoness is aggressive in her touches now, but not in the same way your Empress was. When you were alive, your mistress regarded your body as a conquest, your submission a surrender, your misery her victory. The Demoness runs her claws over your scalp and scritches flakes of dead skin away, soothing rather than painfully digging, and then she presses her thumbs against the brittle bases of your horns. She rubs at the roots where they connect to the skin, a rhythm as firm and unquestionable as any of the subprogramming routines written to correct your thoughts, but with none of their capacity for pain. You couldn’t escape this gentleness any more than you could escape the rigging that holds you. She has none of the fumbling hesitation that the Signless did in your first life, his hands snatched back at any sign of distress, his motions always question rather than answer. _Tell me to stop if you don’t want this,_ and she trusts you to manage that, and she drills straight to the most damaged parts of you.

You don’t have the capacity to control yourself like this. Your muscles relax, and washes of everything you’ve walled away run over you like a dam breaking, and you’re crying. You’re crying for the troll you were and for the family you lost, for the troll you are now and the family who no longer understands you, for the mistress you love and hate and need more than you’ve ever needed anyone in your entire life. You’re crying for the pain you’re in and for the desperate desire to stop feeling it and for the shame of that, for the awful guilt of daring to question your place, for the fear of having this comfort snatched from you. You’re crying because you know this ends, because everything falls apart in the end, and nothing has ever been permanent except your pain, and you want to press pause on this moment so that you never need to feel any of it again. You’re crying because there is immeasurable cruelty in kindness, and you won’t be able to put yourself together again after she leaves, and you can remember every time your Empress pulled you apart for her own amusement, and even with all of that you don’t have the strength to push her away.

She doesn’t stop. She waits until the sobs are closer to rolling waves than primal screams, and then she pulls her hands back from your horns, but she keeps her chest pressed against yours to remind you she’s still there. Her fingertips skim across your temples, over the edges of the goggle straps cutting into your skin. She tugs on them, and the jolt of physical pain drags you back to yourself.

“May I fix these?” she asks. She sounds like a different person now, something gentler underneath her words, and it’s like coming home. This is the troll you and other slaves fantasized about in the depths of your misery, the one who’d ease your pain long enough to give you a death more merciful than your lives.

“It’ll hurt,” you tell her.

“That’s why I’m asking permission.”

“Don’t take them all the way off,” you say. “I don’t think - think I can control my psi. But… yes. You can fix them.”

It does hurt. She has to break the places they soldered to your skin because you can’t imagine them off, they’ve been part of you for too long. You bleed, and it stings and aches and the liquid runs down your face, but once she’s resettled the lenses so they don’t pinch your lids, you close your eyes for the first time in thousands of sweeps, and the relief of that is powerful enough to set off a fresh round of sobs.

It’s such a simple thing, being able to close your eyes. You drop your head to her shoulder, keeping them closed, reveling in that tiny cessation of pain like it’s life support. And then you cry yourself out while she anchors one arm around your back and uses the other to stroke your hair.

The crying lasts a long time, though it’s still impossible to count real seconds in this malleable place. You’re used to the ministrations of your Empress, who would needle you into breakdowns and then leave you to your misery, or start to comfort you and then get bored when you wouldn’t quiet. Your whole body shudders, almost convulsing against the Demoness, and you try to brace yourself for the hollow aching when she leaves, because if she still wants to hurt you then that’s the best way to do it. And she keeps holding you, long past the point she’d have to in order to make her point, her throat rumbling with soothing little clicks, and you are shocked when you finally come to the end of your tears, because you forgot that crying ever _stops._

“There,” she says when you finally slump, still and quiet, against her shoulder. “Less weight now, yes?”

You nose against her jaw. “Stay with me.”

“I need to tell your family I’ll be spending time down here, let them know not to interfere.” When you tense, she shooshes you and presses a soft kiss to your temple. “Then I come back. I won’t leave you alone.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“You could come with me,” she suggests. “I can help you out of the rigging. It’ll take time to learn to use your body again, but you could come. Fresh air might do you good. It’s musty down here.”

Your throat clicks. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

Her bottom lip curls slightly. For one awful moment, you think she’s going to lash out and leave you regardless, and you cast around your mind for the words to make her stay. _No, nonono, please don’t go, I’m not trying to be stubborn, I just can’t, please don’t leave me here, please don’t leave me here, I’ll do anything-_

Then she nods and pats your cheek. “I come back, then. It will only be a few minutes.”

“I - wait. I don’t even know your name.”

She tilts her head. “I don’t remember it.”

“Well, I feel weird calling you Demoness.”

“Make up a name, then.”

“Shouldn’t you choose your own name?”

“I don’t attach much importance to names.”

“Hmm. You were called the Handmaid, right? Handmaiden of Death? Han?”

She wrinkles her nose, and you laugh, a short bark. “Okay, not Han. Mai?”

“Mai,” she says, like she’s trying the syllable out. “Hmm. Mai. Mai is good. Thank you, Helmsman.”

“Psii,” you tell her, forcing past the panicked squirm in your gut that always accompanies clinging to your past. “I - I don’t think I feel like Psii. But that was the name I chose for me.”

“Psii,” she repeats. “Well. I’m glad we could get past the formalities. I think we did the relationship progression backwards.”

You laugh again, harder and more genuine, coughing.

“I will be right back.”

“Wait.”

“Yes?”

“I can’t come down-” you start, and just barely catch yourself before adding _yet_. “But can you maybe - before you go - can you fix the rigging so it doesn’t hurt so much? I don’t know how.”

She gives you a crooked smile. “I can take you out of the rigging, you know. You don’t have to come up to the hive yet. We can compromise.”

"I can’t.”

She pauses, like she’s weighing whether an argument is worth it, and then she nods. “Okay. I will fix it, then. I don’t like listening to your death rattles either. I will need you to help with your imagination.”

“I don’t know _how_ to imagine it different.”

“I will help you.”

You sort of doubt that’s going to work, but you don’t give those thoughts voice, because you’re not sure how long this can last and you don’t really want to start conflict with her. She floats up higher, inspecting the tangles lifting your arms above your head. “We need to get these down. The hanging does the most damage.”

“The wires are too tough.”

“I will help,” she repeats, with the air of longsuffering patience Rosa reserves for especially idiotic complaints, and the sudden clarity of that memory takes your breath away.

She spends a while just looking the tangles over, the way a sculptor might survey a block of marble to perfect their artistic vision. Then she curls her fingers around a cable anchored into your wrist and says, “Imagine more give in this one.”

“I don’t know-”

“Imagine there’s slack. Another few feet sliding out of the ceiling to make the cable longer.”

 

You do, brow furrowed with concentration, and the weight on your arm shifts strangely. It doesn’t lower, still held up by too many other wires, but Mai lets out a pleased hum. “Good. We keep doing that now,” she says.

Inch by inch, you put enough length in the wires to lower your arms to your sides, your body bowing forward like a limp puppet doubling over. The only thing stopping you from slumping in half are the taut wires hooked into your spinal ports, keeping your back straight. Mai runs a finger around the edge of the port in the back of your neck, and you shudder.

“Should I take these out?”

You shake your head, unable to fight the panic the thought brings. “No. Those connect to my neurals. I need them.”

She nods. “I leave them, then. Are you more comfortable?”

There’s more strain in your back now that the cables on your arms aren’t holding you up, but it’s nothing like the ache that was between your shoulders or the pain in what remained of your nerve endings. Putting your arms down was an exercise in agony that made you cry out, made Mai pause every so often to shooshpap you and rub at the junction where your shoulders meet your neck, but now that they’re there, everything feels… better. Painful, but in a dully aching way that’s different from the sharp pulls on your joints or tugging at your skin. And your breathing - you _can_ breathe. You draw air into your stomach because now you can, imagining the oxygen flowing through your blood, healing you more naturally than your Empress’ kiss of life ever could. You’re hazy with the pleasure of it, so it’s a few seconds before you manage to formulate a coherent response.

“I feel good,” you tell her, almost slurred.

She runs her fingers through your hair one last time, fluffing it up. “ _This_ is feeling good to you? You are an exercise in pity. I will be back very soon.”

You can’t think of any more excuses to make her stay, and you’re still not prepared to take her up on the offer of separating from the ship entirely. When she leaves, you comfort yourself by exploring your new freedom. You keep your eyes closed and flick the cameras off, fascinated by how soothing darkness is, like pressing a cold compress over a migraine. You breathe in stops and starts, counting the seconds, pleased by your ability to control your air intake; you hadn’t even realized how painful gasping for oxygen was. You start to test the newfound range of motion with your arms, but retraining those muscles is the bad kind of painful, so you content yourself to let them hang at your sides instead.

You have so many weird new things to explore that you don’t get a chance to fret Mai won’t come back before she’s present again. When she touches your face, you purr at her, because you can’t think of any better way to express how awesome these mods are.

“I see you managed my absence just fine,” she says dryly.

“Did you know people can hold their breath? Is that a ghost thing or can alive people do that too?”

“Alive people can do it for a few minutes. Then they faint or die.” She lifts your head, using her strength to lessen the aching tug of the cable in your neck. “You like feeling good.”

“Feeling good is nice.”

"So why did you avoid it for so long? I still don’t understand.” She shifts so you can rest your chin on her shoulder, anchoring her arms back around you, a warm embrace. “You remember the Sufferer and the Disciple and the Dolorosa. You remember what they were to you. You aren’t a masochist. You know you’re dead. You know you’re not piloting anything but a skeleton. So why?”

You have never had the words to explain this to any of the trolls in the bubbles. You’re not sure you have the words to explain it to her, either, but you make the effort. If there’s anyone who’s going to understand, it’s her, and that makes puzzling through your emotions easier.

“Pain is a default state,” you tell her softly. “You know it like I do. You think the others being optimists is foolish. All good things fall apart. Being alone and being in pain is the core of being a troll. Everything else is just distracting yourself to avoid that reality. There’s no point looking for peace when it’s only going to be torn away. Accepting pain is better than running from it. Surely you understand that.”

She listens carefully. You’re expecting her to call you a fool again, or at least to make some kind of exasperated noise, but instead she squeezes you around the middle. “You think,” she says slowly, “that you shouldn’t feel pleasure, because it’ll just make the sting of pain worse?”

“Yes.”

“If we were alive, I would agree with you. But here - that’s absurd.”

“It’s not.” You let out a shuddering breath, trying to press closer to her. “Like this - what you did for me. Getting to close my eyes. Having my arms down. It all feels really, really good right now. But that just makes me realize how much it hurt to begin with, and I didn’t know how bad the pain was before you took it away. So now when I get strung back up…” Your voice cracks, and it takes a few tries before you can shape the end of the sentence. “When I get strung back up, it’ll hurt that much more, because I’ll have a point of comparison.”

“But who’s going to string you back up?”

“She will. Once she comes to get me.”

Mai pulls away and slides a hand up, curling her fingers around your horn so she can tug your head back and stare at you. Her eyes are narrowed, like she’s looking for some hint of insincerity, but you don’t have any insincerity to offer.

“You don’t understand what it means to be dead,” she says.

That same awful vulnerability tugs on your chest, so once again you have to try a few times to get the words out. “It’s not the same for you. You got to die as a reward. You know your work is done. You know no one’s going to come for you. But my death was a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to burn out. She always pulls me back from the edge. It’s a promise. Me and her, together forever, like fucking gods. She doesn’t break her promises. She’ll find some way to come get me, bring me home. She’ll find some way to heal my body and wake me back up. And if I’ve gotten complacent about being a troll instead of a ship, how much worse is that going to be?”

“She’s not coming for you, Psii.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.” She unwraps her other arm from your waist, running her fingers along your jaw. “I’m time. I’m death. I know how the timeline goes. She didn’t bring you back, Psii. You died when the Vast Glub happened and she pushed you too hard. You didn’t get the ship back to the planet. She was alone for six hundred and twelve sweeps, and in all that time she didn’t find a way to bring you back. And then she moved on and found a family and a new world to destroy, and she left the memory of you behind. You didn’t complete her last orders. You’re not going to complete them by piloting a ghost ship. She doesn’t bring you back. She _didn’t_ bring you back.”

You frown at her. “Why wouldn’t she? I’m hers.”

“I’m sure she tried. But dead is dead. She doesn’t have the power to bring back what’s crossed into my realm. And even if she came here to take you, I would fight her. She killed me the first time, but I am very good at using this domain against people. It’s one of my specialties.”

“She will come for me.”

“She didn’t come for you.” Mai cups your face. “You’re waiting for nothing.”

“But. The trolls out there.” Your bottom lip trembles, and you bite down hard on it, because you’ve spent enough time crying on her already. “The Sufferer, the Disciple, the Dolorosa. I remember them, but I don’t. I remember how I felt around them once, but I don’t feel like that around them anymore. I don’t _know_ them, not like they think they know me. They were barely any of my life. She was my whole life. I need her.”

“She made you need her. She’s not here to make you need her now.”

“She will be.”

“She _won’t_. She wasn’t.” The patient air is back in Mai’s voice. “You have control over your afterlife. You have control over the pain you feel. You aren’t helpless.”

“But I will be. Something will happen. Something always happens.” You can’t turn away with her hands anchoring your face in place, so you close your eyes instead, not wanting to hold her gaze. “It’s better to accept that.”

“So do you think I should leave? That I should put your rigging back to how it was?”

“Yes,” you say, and hear her sharp intake of breath. She was being rhetorical, you know, trying to point out a logical fallacy. Now you have to face the misery you’ve been skirting this whole time, and to your utter embarrassment a fresh wave of tears spills over your cheeks. You try for a smile to lighten it, but you can’t get your mouth to do what you want, so you give up.

“I’m not strong enough to tell you to go,” you say. “I like this too much. But you should go. I can’t - I shouldn’t let you make me feel good.”

“And the others. You send them away because you’re afraid you’ll feel good around them.”

“No, I send them away because they think I’m something I’m not.”

“None of them are as they were when you knew them, either. They’re all different. No reason not to get to know them. If they can forgive me the pains I caused them as a slave, they can forgive you the pains you caused as a helmsman. But you know that already.”

You open your eyes again, watching her study you.

“I can’t force you to leave the ship,” she says. “You won’t get anything but pain if you stay here. You know that. Your body will hurt less if you let it out of the rigging.”

“I can’t.”

“Not ever?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wait here another century for the Empress to come, and she doesn’t. Are you ready now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wait so long time has no meaning. Longer than you were at the helm alive. The eons blend together. Are you ready now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Idiot,” she says, clicking her tongue. “You don’t care if the Empress comes or not. You think you should stay because the pain you know now is better than any imaginary pain you might risk in the future. I’m not here to debate about that. I already told you I’d agree if we were alive. That’s how I lived when I was alive. But we aren’t alive.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Nothing matters,” she tells you, almost fondly. “Pain doesn’t matter. Pleasure doesn’t matter. Nothing has meaning here. We exist for absolutely no purpose. We are shades. Our stories are over. We influence nothing, we change nothing. Living trolls suffer. We’re done with that. So get _over_ yourself.”

“You make nihilism sound so cheerful.”

“The meaning of my life was to bring an entire species to ruin. I _love_ not having a purpose. I like existing without pain. You would too, if you tried it, but you have to stop being afraid long enough to try.”

“I… can’t.”

“What happens if you leave here?”

“I don’t _know_.”

“That’s better than knowing you’ll be in pain.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“You are a very frustrating person.” She boops you on the nose. “You’re lucky I can see me in you, because otherwise I would not be bothering with any of this.”

“Yeah, I get that you’re not usually made of warm fuzzies.”

“I will offer another compromise,” she says. “You don’t want to disconnect your neurals, yes? You want to stay connected to the ship for comfort. Untethering from it makes you nervous. But what about the rest of the rigging? The cables in your arms and legs? Can we get those off of you? If you don’t like it, we hook you up again.”

You hesitate.

“We already altered the rigging and you liked it,” she points out. “We get rid of more pain like this, but you don’t leave the ship. You can worry you’ll get strung up again and be scared of pain, but you won’t be in real pain. You’ll just be scared of it. You think the fear is worse than the pain itself, but you can talk to me about the fear. I get to stay here a while. I am feeling very pale.”

You swallow, thinking it over. The pale thing has been pretty fucking obvious for a while, but it’s comforting to hear her say it. She’s already got you wrapped so tightly around her that there’s little reason to fluff up the charade if she doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t have to reel you in more tightly with falsehoods - she’s just giving voice to the thoughts already flitting through her mind.

“The rigging isn’t built for extraction,” you say. “It’s built to keep me in.”

“I will need more imagination help, then. You managed to manipulate the cables once. You can do it again.”

“It’ll hurt.”

She reaches into one of the pockets of her sweatpants and pulls out a small tub of some kind of gel.

“What’s that?”

“Anesthetic. To numb your nerves. So you don’t feel the pain.”

“You walked in here with that?”

“Imagined it. Like magic.” She taps her fingers gently against your lips. “I will work at taking the cables out. You imagine the wires brittle, dry. They’ll be easier to extract like that than alive. You know what dead biocables look like, yes? There’s loose ones scattered on the floor if you need a reminder.”

She turns her attention to the wires around your waist first, unfazed in a way you’re sure none of the other trolls in these bubbles would be. There are some advantages to having seen every horror that’s ever plagued your species. Her fingertips rub the gel into your skin until you stop feeling them, the motions pale as snow. Then she plucks the cables handful by handful, aided by your attempts to mentally dry them out. They slither to the floor like flakes of dead skin, but you flip the helmsblock cameras off and keep your eyes closed, because you can’t watch the process without being sick.

It takes a long time, much longer than lowering your arms did; you don’t know how she has enough gel, but you figure she must be imagining more as she goes to replenish her stock. At the very least, the anesthetic does its job. Your freedom comes in the slow sensation of release from your body, the same feeling of light weightlessness that accompanies a long overdue haircut with none of the nerve-shearing agony you'd braced for. When she’s worked her way around both legs, leaving them surrounded by the piled column of cables but hanging independently, she gives your arms the same treatment. The wires hooked into your spinal ports remain, the last physical tether to the column, but your limbs are free.

Their freedom doesn’t mean you’re exactly ready to run a marathon, though. You can’t remember how to move your legs, so Mai tugs them out of the center of the column herself, until you’re perching on top of the wires like they’re a throne rather than a prison. She nudges the mass around with her psi, shaping it into more of a mesa than a mountain, and tugs on your spinal cables until they allow enough give for you to lay down. You’re struck by the thought that she could have ripped you from the column with her psi instead, but she used her hands the whole time and went slow for the sake of being _pale_ , and that gives you enough strength to drape an arm over her waist and pull her close. Granted, the arm feels like a wet noodle, and you overshoot a bit, but it’s the thought that counts.

She curls up against you, relaxing into the mass of powered-down wires. “I think,” she says, a hand running idly through your hair, “if the Sufferer saw what we were using as a pile, he would die all over again.”

“Good thing the Sufferer’s not here, then.”

She thumbs a chip halfway up your horn, and your jaw goes slack. “Tell me about him,” she says. “Tell me what you remember about Psii.”

For some reason - the relief surging through your muscles, maybe, your body crying from the ease it’s been craving for thousands of sweeps - you don’t hesitate. You hug her close to you with your clumsy arms, not quite able to feel or coordinate your hands yet, and talk. You tell her about how he nursed you back to health when he carried you out of the factory, how he and Rosa and Di gave you stories about who they were and where they’d come from and where they were going, about the faith you had in his visions. You tell her about the struggle to see him as equal rather than divine, about the first time he and Di drew you into their pile together, about the aching in your chest as you grabbed for your freedom. You tell her about all the stupid mistakes you made, the petty conflicts you started, petty grudges you kept, kind words you left unsaid, all the failures that took root in you after your installation, all the pain you shoved so far away you couldn’t touch it.

You tell her about the war, and about trying to save your family, and about that failure - your most catastrophic, your least forgivable. You falter after that, and find that you can’t talk about watching him burn, watching Di run, watching Rosa herded away in chains. Your voice keeps cracking every time you try to shape the words, so she squeezes you against her and takes over the conversation herself.

She tells you about growing up knowing what she would become, about the different ways Scratch would torture and break her to try to make her into what he wanted her to be. She tells you about the orders she was forced to carry out, about the trolls she dared to stray close to, about the ways she tried to change outcomes before she gave up in the face of futility. She tells you about the people she cared for from a distance, and the fates they met, and the way her heart hardened because there would never be any comfort waiting for her. She tells you about how she became steel so that nothing could bend her, and she tells you about how she learned to feel nothing as she watched every good thing the planet may have had fall apart, and she tells you about how she hated forcing your service more than any of her other orders because she didn’t want to make a troll like her.

When she runs out of tales to tell, you find the strength to speak about the helm. You tell her about your Empress, the words halting and confused, because your thoughts here are questionable in a way your first life memories aren’t. It starts hesitant, full of qualifications - _she needed me for the Empire, she was the strongest Empress she could be, she wasn’t evil_ \- but as the words pour forth anger threads into them. _She left me_ alone _and she didn’t have to, she knew I was going to be obedient, she kept hurting me even though I told her I’d do anything, she - I need her more than I ever needed the Sufferer, what does that mean? She matters more, she’s mine and I’m hers, we were together so much longer than I was ever with them and we’re two halves of a whole and why would she_ leave me-

Mai lets you snare your confusion into inescapable knots, allowing you to try to work out the hurt and fear yourself. It’s only when you get so agitated you can’t go on that she presses a soft kiss to your mouth to hush you, another to your nose to gentle you.

“You didn’t need the Sufferer or the Disciple or the Dolorosa because you were allowed to live your life outside of them,” she says. “The Empress made your existence all about her on purpose. There’s a difference between dependence and love. She made you feel like you’re powerless without her because then you wouldn’t fight back. But she can’t hurt or help you here. The only one who can take care of you now is you.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You have family here to help. You don’t have to be alone. They don’t know how to help when you won’t talk to them, but they’ll try if you do. They are... foolishly optimistic, and avoiding their own pain, but avoiding pleasure isn’t any less avoidance. It’s just the opposite side of the coin. You’re as disastrous as they are.”

“At least the way I live doesn’t leave any room for crushing disappointment.”

“Because things are already as bad as they can get. What sort of life is that? What sort of death is that?” She rubs her thumb over your jaw. “You say I should leave you so you can go back to your pain. You say you should get used to pain. Should I go back to Scratch? Back to my master? If I get the chance, should I go back to being in pain so I get used to things at their worst?”

“What - no, of course not.”

“Then why should you? If all bad things happen to all trolls, and pain is the default, I should use my afterlife as you use yours, yes? If you’re right. If you’re working from logic instead of fear.”

“That’s not…” You let out a frustrated breath. “You aren’t me.”

“So pain is only the default for you?”

“That’s not-! I can’t _risk_ it. You chose to risk it. That’s your right.”

“You don’t take risks out of fear. It’s foolish. You’re more afraid of the fear itself than any painful outcomes. That’s what she did to you. How do you let that go if you don’t try?”

You tuck your head underneath her chin, careful not to jab her with your horns. “What do you _want_ from me?”

“Come out of the ship.” She lays her palm on your chest, fingers splayed. “It will be here if you need it again. Come see the rest of the bubble. You don’t need to speak to anyone. I will send them away if they get too close. But come breathe fresh air. Eat real food. Look at the gardens. Lay in a blanket pile. There’s lots of things you can do, and lots of things you might not do too. You can just lay in a corner under an open window if you want. Just come out of the ship. Come up where it doesn’t hurt.”

“That… is easier said than done.”

“Has anything that’s happened so far felt bad? Fixing your goggles? Getting the rigging off? Stretching your muscles?”

“No, but…”

“Are you scared? Feel helpless? Feel trapped?”

“...No.”

“And the ship stays if you need it. It’s your bubble corner. Other imaginations won’t take it apart. Come outside with me.”

“I don’t think I can do that.”

She grunts with frustration. “Why _not_?”

“I can’t feel my legs yet.”

A pause, and then she laughs, long and loud and racuous. “Let me tell you a secret. The gel was just moisturizer. Like you use for chapped lips. No anesthetic properties at all. I tricked you into imagining no pain.”

You pull back, gaping at her.

She’s grinning ear to ear, looking a lot younger than the ancient troll you know she is. “You see? That’s how easy it is not to feel pain in death. It’s all thought. Your own thought. Other people’s influence doesn’t matter. You are your own. That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“Okay,” you say, “but either way, I can’t remember how to use my legs.”

“We have time to learn. I can carry you. And if you can’t remember, we can make a four wheel device. Or prosthetics. Robots are very impressive.” She presses her lips together. “Will you come if I carry you?”

“I…” You frown. “I feel like I shouldn’t. But I can’t think of any arguments that make sense.”

“If you don’t like it, you come back to the ship. It will still be here. I’ll help you plug in. But give outside a chance? Just a chance.”

You pull your head down, tucking your chin to your chest.

“Yes?” she presses.

“Yes,” you whisper.

Pulling your spinal ports doesn’t hurt, not the same way the rest of the extraction might have. They’re meant to slip in and out to allow for easy repair and upgrades, since this ship is old, and the neural interfaces have gone through a hell of a lot of changes to maximize efficiency. She rolls you onto your stomach and tugs them out of their locked slots one by one, releasing the final tethers holding you here, working from the bottom up. Her fingers pause when they wrap around the last cable, the one in the back of your neck, the one that’ll cut you off from all of the ship senses and coding projects you’ve spent so much time trying to recreate.

You’ll have to start from scratch if you come back, you know. You don’t have the strength of imagination to keep the ship senses working without being jacked into the ship itself, the same way you can’t hold onto a dreamscape unless you’re in that part of the dream itself. You tense, and she slides her other hand down your back, over the bumps of your empty ports.

“You’re ready now?” she asks.

You’re not ready. You’re not ever going to be ready - this nest is a comfort you don’t want to leave, because pain is familiar and you’re so frightened of the unknown. But you’ve come this far already. You don’t have any arguments that make sense, and the column will be here at least, and if everything falls to shit you can start over. You’ve started over before. All you need to do is trust her.

“I’m ready,” you tell her.

She kisses your hair, her fingers curling tighter. One sharp tug, and you’re a troll.


End file.
